JD: Why are the Dead Sea Scrolls are so key to the Christian life and the Bibles that we carry everyday?
RP: In the first place we have no other documents from the time period of Jesus and the New Testament and people have been very critical of the New Testament saying that it was produced at a much later time. Well the Dead Sea Scrolls have shown us they are true to the time in which they claim to have been written. These misunderstandings about Jesus and the missing anicope that Judaism had because after the destruction of the Temple and the reorganization of Judaism after 90 AD Rabbinic Judaism took things in a very different direction and they basically defined themselves an opposition to Christianity. Well the Dead Sea Scrolls had none of those controversies involved. They’re looking at the prophets and their interpreting in a very consistent way as what you see in the pages of the New Testament.
So it’s a great help to scholars to affirm the message of the
New Testament but to understand the culture, the background, the language, many
of the types of practices that are going on that were really lost a later
period of time. So if you try to reconstruct the New Testament in this way from
leader of Rabbinic Judaism you can’t be sure you’re accurate except from the
Dead Sea Scrolls, which are written at that same time really give us a window
in the past that we never before.
I’d like to say something Jimmy about this whole quest we’re
involved in. The looters it cost them nothing. They go at their own freedom to
search these caves and if they find something they get huge benefits because of
the black market Scroll fragments even pieces of Scroll jars command high
prices, because we are in a race against time. If we really want to have these
treasures that will help us understand the Bible and then from the Bible help
us practice our faith in a more accurate way people need to support it.
JD: Dr. Randall Price, a qualified archaeologist working on the
shores of the Dead Sea in Israel in search of more Dead Sea Scrolls.
We report this information because it is setting the stage
for Bible prophecy to be fulfilled.
The Dead Sea Scrolls have been an excellent source in the
search for sources that Biblical scholars have been using for confirming the accuracy
of the Bible, both the Old and New Testament, especially in the writings of the
ancient Jewish prophets these prophecies have revealed to us the more sure word
of prophecy, that’s II Peter 1:19. And of course this more sure word reveals
God’s plan for the future.
